I’ve seen a lot of people on here be teased for difficulty expressing themselves. Either people complain “you’re using big person words to describe mundane things” when they’re aiming for precision or “woah, we don’t need that damn wall of text” when they’re aiming for clarity. It’s like people just want to complain.
A
Woah, slow down there with all that jargon! Could you put it in layman’s terms for me?
a
Could you dumb it down a shade?
Long is fine, as long as it’s broken into paragraphs. I’m not gonna parse a wall of text.
I prefer it to be as precise as possible. Any words I don’t know, I will look up.
A if I know the vocabulary. B if I don’t.
Its all about the audience.
I’m definitely in support of A, regardless. I only know complex words from having seen them used correctly in the wild; how could anyone be expected to learn them otherwise?
The ability to find an approximate definition of a new word using context - and slowly whittle it down to the actual definition over subsequent encounters - is invaluable for gaining better language comprehension.
C: I once wrote a high school physics lab report in poetic meter, with rhymes and all.
I failed, but that’s what community college was for. No regrets!
Doing things like this makes Neil deGrasse Tyson cry.
I dont have a preference as long as there aren’t excessive acronyms or at least explaining what the acronyms stand for. Im not trying to decode three letter mysteries all throughout a person’s writing.
Mix
What if one isn’t possible? Which of the two would you choose?
It sounds like a strange scenario. You can write a lot of text but not make it precise?
I’d say it’s better to have it short and precise. It gives you an opportunity to study the details and learn while the long text sounds like it could be more open to interpretation and confusion
What kind of audience are you speaking to - this sounds like a specific (or series of specific) conversation(s).
I’d rather short, concise, and precise for spoken word and longer and drawn out for written word, if I had to choose.
Someone writing a wall of text when it is not asked for or appreciated may be being insensitive to their audience. On the other hand, I’ve literally had people ask for it and then someone else steps in to complain, so definitely there are Karens who feel entitled to whinge no matter what you do. Just settle in your own mind whether you are doing the right thing, and let being correct remain your guide as to what to do.
Whichever one you choose, you should never use more words than you need to.
There’s a third option and I use it to explain things to stupid, old, and Boomer people. Not that those are mutually exclusive but that’s beside the point.
You have to dumb it down but still be concise. Use the fewest number of words necessary, and explain it in a way that any idiot can understand. For example, when I explain how computers work to my dad and stepmother, I explain it with simple analogies like “The hard drive is where the memory lives, the ram is where the short-term memory lives, the processor is where the thinking happens, and the motherboard is the body that holds it all together.”
When writing manuals, as in for work procedures, You need to also give them step by step specific instructions, with pictures if possible, screenshots will do for software, so they know what to look for. I’ve worked with a lot of tech illiterate people and you really need to make it super simple so that everybody can understand that page 3 explains how to do this thing, and page 5 explains how to do the other thing. No preamble, no flowery language, just simple instructions, including literally which buttons to push in what order to make a thing happen. Also including a this is what you do if something you don’t recognize or understand happens to go backward, and a reminder to ask for help if all else fails or you get confused.
I worked in a warehouse for 10 years and that exact procedure worked great for teaching people are stupid, goofy, proprietary, 30-year-old pre-Windows XP software, along with windows instructions for how to get it working where necessary. You might feel like you’re talking down to people, so if it’s verbal you have to say it in a non-aggressive, non-confrontational, helpful tone of voice, ask them if they understand, etc. If they ask why it seems so simplistic or see that you can skip a certain step because they understand it already, you just tell them that they have to make the manuals understandable by everybody, and that you have to explain it to them this way because you’re made to by management. Always pass the blame uphill.
I once read a 40 page article about laying undersea cables, in Wired, by Neal Stephenson. It was so engaging and I learned a lot. So for me, longer and written for layperson. Absolutely. Also I was quite surprised a magazine would give anyone that much space.
I would much rather learn a new word than slog through a glib deluge.
There is always the Wikipedia style link to the definition whenever such word arrives. This is what browser tabs are for.
